 On Tuesday evening we got to participate in a College Hoops 2K8 conference call with Producer Zach Timmerman and Assissant Producer Jerson Sapida of 2K Sports and College Hoops 2K8 cover athlete Greg Oden. The good folks at 2K Sports wanted to give us a little incite on what to expect with the upcoming Hoops title that is due to be released on November 19th, just a short week away.
One of the goals that the 2K Sports team had was to make the game a little more friendly to the casual players. They feel that even though their games are pointed more towards the hardcore crowd, they didn’t want to make the game too intense so that it would scare away the casual gamers. One of the ways that they did that was by making the play diagram show up on the court so you know how to run the play, much like how it is in NBA 2K7. Another way they are making the game more casual gamer friendly is that you can pull of the post moves by using the face buttons rather than using the R-stick due to the fact you can get better results without having to mess around with the accuracy of the R-Stick.
Another area where we can expect to see improvement in the game is in the AI. According to Zach the CPU will boast a smarter AI on offense and they revamped the movement model a bit, so we can expect to see smoother animations than College Hoops 2K7. The game also boasts on the fly coaching that was implemented from NBA 2K7 and features 100 different offensive and defensive plays. On top of all that, they said they fixed the sim engine as well and we can expect more realistic stats. It was refreshing to know that the 2K producers do in fact look act the community sites on a daily basis and pick up on ways to improve their products. And one other tidbit that I suspected was that every year they are able to make some changes to the College Hoops engine after the NBA game is released and people get their hands on it and expose some flaws. I always thought that College Hoops felt like a tighter version of NBA 2K
One feature the 2K Sports team was really excited about is 2K Share. Basically, it sounds a lot like the EA Sports locker, but from the sounds of it you can actually take any of your College Hoops game files and upload them to your locker. So, if you have a nice set of sliders, upload them to your locker for people to DL. Roster files? Upload them to your locker so people can DL them. It also sounded like they plan on utilizing the feature in their future sports titles as well. It sounds like that if it’s utilized and implemented correctly, it can be a very powerful tool for us gamers.
As it’s been mentioned throughout the interwebs, the atmosphere has been revamped. College Hoops 2K8 will feature a revamped, more dynamic crowd which includes more chants, a more robust create-a-chant feature, as well as more colors and what in the crowd itself. The crowd actually plays a part in the game with the new 6th man feature and motivation system. It sounds kind of like what we’ve seen in games like NCAA Football where as you make plays, your crowd gets more into the game, the more they are into the game, the better your team will play. Now, there’s no screen shake or anything, but there is a meter and they did assure us that they did a lot of testing on this feature as to not make it too powerful. They said they tried to find a balance that wouldn’t be too over the top thus making the game unrealistic. It should be interesting to see the new revamped crowd as I thought the crowd and atmosphere was good already.
The All-American Training Challenge is a new feature in this years game which helps the casual gamers learn some of the finer points of the by going through a bunch of drills, thus gaining points. During your training session, you go up against top NCAA players of the past like Greg Oden, JJ Redick, and Alando Tucker among others. You can check out our posted video for a glance at the All-American Training Challenge in action.
About half way through the conference call, Greg Oden got on the line. Now, I really didn’t know what he was going to talk about, but as it turns out it wasn’t much. He’s happy he’s on the cover, but keeps it low key, his motion capture session wasn’t too difficult or strenuous and that he didn’t really have any input into the development of the game. Like I said, I didn’t really expect much.
On top of all the other things that was talked about, here’s some key tidbits of info that we were able to pick up:
• Tournament mode was rewritten and they added consolation games
• Lock on D is in the game
• Only former players signed up in the game are the only names that are in it
• ABL players cannot be edited
• You get a small recruiting bonus for playing ABL games
• You can export college players to NBA 2K8
• 6th Man feature is online as well
• Classic teams are not playable online
• School names and player numbers appear on front of the jersey with created schools
• Demo coming out “very quickly”
After hearing all about the game for over an hour, I can honestly say that I’m very exciting to get my hands on this game and get the Izzone rocking! In the meantime, check out the two videos below featuring the All-American Training Challenge and the 6th Man feature.
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